Philosophy Discussion Forums | A Humans-Only Club for Open-Minded Discussion & Debate

[Pattern-chaser]

What scares me about this conversation - do we all have raging Dunning Kruger or is a situation that corrupt in science communication that we might actually be right that there's something wrong with the idea of strong emergence?

I believe I live in a messed up / Darwinian enough world where I could see both possibilities with almost equal weight - ie. that none of us know what we're talking about and even the LLM's don't know what they're talking about because any real proper explanations of what strong emergence is (in the real world) are not available online to the public (plebs don't need to know) or could there be a whole bunch of bunkum we're dealing with in popular science communication that's either twisting concepts for political purposes or even sometimes entirely making them up for politics?

Not a pleasant set of circumstances.

Are you describing some sort of science-based cover-up? Keeping the truth from the rest of us? What truth would that be, I wonder? Or have I just misunderstood?

[The Beast]

Last words of Socrates:
Crito, I owe the sacrifice of a rooster to Aesculapius, will you pay that debt and not neglect to do so?
After all, Crito was an ignorant rich man and a mecenas (see Gaius Maecenas) so not uncommon for someone else to pay. … But, why a rooster? A temperature function together with the function of pressure (or atmospheric pressure) makes oxygen and hydrogen solids. For oxygen at -219 deg C and normal pressure, a transition into a blue solid with unique magnetic properties “emerge”. If the function of pressure is added, then it changes into a red solid… The case for hydrogen is more peculiar. Is it because of (functions) or some random event?... and intelligence is a property of functions.

[Papus79]

Also are you saying that room temperature liquids in general are a case of strong emergence or just water?

No, I'm only saying that liquid water, 'emerging' from hydrogen and oxygen — both gases — is a real-world example of emergence. Unpredictable and unexpected, too.

Right... so I'm getting at a subtler point beneath this, which is that it would seem to be - at least from what information is broadly available - that the idea of 'strong emergence' is a horrible gimmick and that it doesn't signify anything that's 'real'. Anything that has the seeds of an emergent property in its substrate would be weakly emerging. The claim that there's even such a thing as a 'strong' vs. 'weak' emergence is a public dialogue and it's hard to understand why 'weak emergence' isn't just 'emergence'.

I mean - I think I know some of the reasons (willing at modern industrialized global trade requires exploiting resources better than anyone else - any talk of reality being fundamentally 'conscious' would damage competitive prosperity, therefor panpsychism or similar ideas would be 'malinformation') and we could discuss that one more but - I'm trying to peel back some of the Lakoff-framing that seems to have wormed its way into science and the philosophy of science and then maybe see if I can also be respectful of the deeper concerns over why people are quite anti when it comes to frameworks that aren't strictly (strong) emergentist with respect to consciousness.

[Steve3007]

In my view, if someone were to deny the existence of emergent properties then they would be denying, among other things, the existence of thermodynamic properties such as the temperature, pressure and volume of a gas. Those are all collective/statistical properties of large quantities of gas molecules. It would seem odd to me to regard those as "something for free" and/or to deny their existence.

It seems self-evident to me that there are properties which, by definition, apply to collections without applying individually to the members of the collection.

I think that's weak emergence though - ie. shapes of snowflakes, wetness or fluid dynamics of water, I'd even add cymatic patterns with salt on plates. Those are situations where environmental feedback iterates over a group of some type of molecule and brings out possibilities already latent in the molecules involved but the behavior of which is 'sculpted' or contextualized in ways that the individual components wouldn't achieve on their own.

'Strong emergence' OTOH almost seems to be separated from weak emergence via the nested claim that it gets something for free - like weaving together the right kinds and qualities of carpet threads to get an authentic Persian flying carpet that lives up to the description and can air-taxi people around town.

I don't think there's a hard dividing line between strong and weak emergence. Just a continuum of complexity. As with any continuous spectrum we can label different parts of it, and draw our lines on it, but that doesn't stop it from being a continuum. Some physical systems are more complex than others. For example, the emergence of consciousness/intelligence/sentience etc from the collective interconnected behaviour of neurons is more complex than the emergence of temperature as the collective movement of gas molecules. It's all emergence though. It's all properties of collections that aren't present in the individual constituents of the collection.